Businesses today are more susceptible than ever to downtime. Organizations continue to suffer the most from disruptions caused by natural disasters, equipment malfunctions, power outages, cyberattacks, and other catastrophes that have increased in frequency and intensity in recent years. The analysis states that 60% of outages will cost more than $100,000 and 15% will cost more over $1 million in 2022, up from 39% and 11%, respectively, in 2019. Downtime can be a death knell for organisations, especially for small and midsize businesses, when taking into account the productivity loss and reputational harm that businesses experience in addition to these financial effects (SMBs).
Organizations need to have a proactive plan rather than a reactive one to reduce potential losses and end downtime in the case of an IT disaster. The majority of SMBs, however, cannot afford to invest the funds, time, and resources needed to study, put into practise, and test disaster recovery strategies. Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is quickly gaining popularity in the midmarket category because of this. It enables a company to back up its data in a third-party cloud computing environment, together with IT infrastructure configurations and a disaster recovery (DR) runbook. The cloud service provider will offer the organisation the DR orchestration required for regaining access and functionality to the IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
What exactly is Disaster Recovery as a Service?
Disaster-Recovery-as-a-service enables businesses to outsource the administration and maintenance of disaster recovery functions to a third-party provider. Its is defined as the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a natural catastrophe, power outage or another type of business disruption. DRaaS enables organizations that can’t afford secondary data centers to leverage disaster recovery capability.
What are the benefits of DRaaS?
DRaaS assures the security and accessibility of business-critical data, systems, and applications during a crisis. As DRaaS replicates the entire infrastructure on virtual servers in fail-safe mode, businesses can rest assured that their disaster recovery will be significantly quicker, if not instantaneous. Due to the fact that the third-party facility provides infrastructure, maintenance, and administration, organisations can reduce CapEx costs and free up personnel for more strategic endeavours.
DRaaS is a natural match for SMBs that find it prohibitively expensive to invest in a secondary data centre for disaster recovery. However, midmarket enterprises (MMEs) are also increasingly employing this disaster recovery method, as it is costly for businesses of any size to invest twice in IT infrastructure.
How DRaaS works?
A DRaaS service provider offers data replication, hosting, and recovery services, allowing the client to switch to an off-site DR environment when a calamity is declared. Unlike traditional disaster recovery methods, which require organisations to independently administer an off-site DR facility, DRaaS transfers this responsibility to service providers.
The provider may utilise a software application or hardware appliance to provide failover for on-premises or cloud-based environments. Virtual machines (VMs), on-premises servers, and mainframes are all capable of being backed up in the off-site environment. Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are documented in a SLA to evaluate and determine the client’s specific requirements.
What should be evaluated when choosing a DRaaS provider?
When selecting a DRaaS provider, organisations must take a number of factors into account due to the plethora of available vendors and options. Businesses must have a thorough comprehension of the business and technical objectives fueling their DR plan and choose a solution that meets their specific requirements and budget.
Here are some critical features that will help you make the right decision.
Service level agreements (SLAs)
Ensure your service provider’s SLA fulfils your RPO and RTO goals. It all starts with a business impact analysis that priority-wise classifies the processes and systems critical to the firm’s performance. The allowable RPO and RTO for data, applications, and systems will determine these classes. Certain apps can be offline for a while without harming the business, but others might inflict irreversible damage in a few seconds.
Create a performance SLA with your vendor to guarantee pre-defined performance for each essential application or system. When both client and vendor are affected by the same natural disaster, recovery targets must be set.
Capabilities
After determining your DRaaS needs, picking a supplier is crucial. These vendor questions can help you examine many factors. Public IPs? What networks do they support? Can they run multiple OSes, hypervisors, and N-tier applications? If so, how promptly and are those guarantees contractual? How does the vendor failback to your principal site after disaster recovery?
Choose a vendor that can reconstruct your complex data infrastructure and provide cloud-to-cloud replication in a multicloud scenario. Support popular virtualization systems and on-premises server environments.
Capacity
Your vendor’s capacity is another factor to consider. Has their solution sufficient bandwidth and resources to replicate a large data centre environment with thousands of virtual machines and physical servers? What is the scalability of their service? Does the cost vary as data volume increases? Consider each of these prior to deciding on a solution.
Reliability
It is crucial to comprehend what will occur if a natural calamity prevents your vendor from providing services. A identical situation occurs when the service provider cannot meet its SLAs. Understand your rights under the contract as well as how your business will react and recover in every possible scenario.
Accessibility
Ask your DRaaS provider how users will access internal applications and how the virtual private network (VPN) will function during a crisis. How will the client access the cloud? Discover how the domain name system (DNS) operates. All of these are essential for ensuring that internal systems and data are accessible during a disaster.
Pricing
Plans for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can be obtained via traditional subscription-based models or pay-per-use models. Pricing can be highly variable and typically depends on the number of virtual machines, servers, and applications included in the disaster recovery plan. To maintain the cost-effectiveness of your DRaaS strategy, it is optimal to select a provider who can offer a variety of DRaaS services for various application classes.
Depending on how quickly you need to recover your applications, you can choose from a variety of adaptable DRaaS options. Choose from one-hour or 24-hour recovery times — both of which are guaranteed in writing for mission-critical applications — and an unlimited recovery option for everything else.